I Watch Films: Torture Garden

 

Torture Garden

Dr Diabolo (Burgess Meredith) welcomes customers into a London Fairground sideshow. It’s moderately creepy and he invites some to a truly scary experience for £5, which was worth something in those days. Five of them accept and they discover a fortunetelling manikin of Atropos, the fate whose shears cut the lifelines. They each look at the shears and see a horrible future in the form of a short film – it’s a portmanteau horror film!

Collin Williams (Michael Bryant) murders his uncle to get hold of his fortune, but it turns out that he got the money from a magic cat that eats people. Carla Hayes (Beverley Adams) manages to find success in Hollywood by sabotaging her roommate, only to learn the secret of the “top ten” – they’re androids. Dorothy Endicott (Barbara Ewing) dates a man only to have his piano Euterpe take against her and kill her.

The film, and all the stories were by Robert Bloch, and the final one is one of his more famous – The Man Who Collected Poe. Ronald Wyatt (Jack Palance) visits the world’s foremost collector of Edgar Allen Poe memorabilia, Lancelot Canning (Peter Cushing). Insisting on seeing more he discovers previously unseen Poe writing, but something’s off about them, a dark secret. This one’s pretty good!

There’s a rather confusing end section that doesn’t really make sense as well. One classic bit, the piano is creepy and the other two are fine. One thing a portmanteau film like this always seems to suggest is the world is filled with weird and horrid stuff, and so here, with Dr Diabolo collecting them. Anyway this is better than many, a fine mixture of styles that manages to maintain some unity in the collection.

Watch This: Classic portmanteau horror film with a couple of really first rate bits
Don’t Watch This: Horrid people have worse things happen to them
Not The Torture Garden Club: Both taking their name separately from a French novel of 1899 by Octave Mireau